I was told to marry into my own faith. My daughter will get to choose

As an adolescent, my mother told me that if I married a person from another faith, she would disinherit me. I started dating a Maltese Catholic boy and she told me I would have to leave home. I didn’t care. I would not be controlled.

He introduced me to his mother and sister on our second date, and dumped me the next day because I was Muslim. Up to that point, I had thought of myself as Australian – that my culture and religion didn’t matter when dating because it didn’t matter to me. That was the day that I learnt it mattered to many people.

Soon after, I met my husband, who is of Bosnian-Muslim background like me. I used to tell people I didn’t marry him because he was Bosnian, but that I fell in love with a man who happened to be Bosnian. But as I get older, I have to accept that’s not the truth. There was some part of me that was drawn to him because our cultural background meshed.

I came from a family where marrying into the same religion mattered. My grandfather had moved my grandmother and his children from Croatia where he had stable work, back to Bosnia where his family was plunged into poverty, because his daughters were of marrying age and they were flirting with Croatian Catholics.

When he lay on his deathbed, he summoned his unattached grandchildren and made them promise they would marry into the Muslim faith. Only one of six did not comply. The rest of us bowed to his will.

My mother married three times, every husband a Bosnian-Muslim. She knew my grandfather’s love was conditional on this. When she threatened to disinherit me, she was only emulating the parenting she had received.

I once spoke to a friend who is Italian Catholic about whether she received this message from her family. She didn’t. “Italian culture is all around me and my children can get exposure to it at any time.” That’s when I realised that there was something deeper behind my grandfather’s insistence that we marry into our faith.

During the Bosnian War of 1992-1995, when Yugoslavia was breaking up, Bosnian-Muslims were subjected to ethnic cleansing in which Serb forces expelled them from their homes. It’s estimated that between 1 and 1.3 million people were uprooted. Then there was the genocide, in which more than 8000 Bosnian-Muslim men and boys were killed and buried in mass graves in Srebrenica – the largest massacre on European soil since World War II.